Sefton Delmer: The Reichstag Fire

I saw the Reichstag fire not only from the outside, but the inside – in all senses of the word. And as a result I formed a view of its origin very different from the legend accepted by historians.

The news that the Reichstag was burning came to me from one of the many petrol station attendants to whom I had given my card with a request to ring me if anything noteworthy happened nearby. There were no taxis to be seen, and I had already put my car in the garage a quarter of a mile away. So I ran, ran and ran the whole mile and a half from my office to the Reichstag.

I got there at a quarter to ten – just forty minutes after the first alarm had been given. Already there were quite a few people standing around, watching the flames funnelling up through the great glass dome in a pillar of fire and smoke. Every minutes fresh trains of fire engines were arriving, their bells clanging as they raced through the streets.

An excited policeman told me, “They’ve got one of them who did it, a man with nothing but his trousers on. He seems to have used his coat and shirt to start the fire. But there must be others still inside. They’re looking for them there.”

As I was scouting around, I ran into Douglas Reed of the Times. He told me how he had managed to get into the building but had been thrown out immediately by Göring. ‘Beaten by that staid old slow coach, the Times!’ I thought. ‘What ignominy!’ I went on with my walk around the building, talking to as many people as I could in an effort to find out what had happened. And there under the trees of the Tiergarten, and just opposite the Reichstag entrance I saw a familiar figure: Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Editor of the NaziVölkischer Beobachter and Hitler’s number one adviser on foreign affairs. He had been driving home through the Tiergarten in his car, Rosenberg told me, when he noticed the fire.

“I only hope,” Rosenberg said gloomily, “that this is not the work of our chaps. It’s just the sort of damn silly thing some of them might do!”

Which, whatever you may think about the origins of that fire, shows that there was at least one Nazi who had nothing to do with it.

And then Karl Hanke, the bearded secretary of Dr. Goebbels, came puffing up. He had been compelled to leave his car, because the police would not let it through the cordon.

“Hello Hanke,” I said, “where are you off to?”

“I am going inside to see what is happening,” Hanke replied.

“The Führer wants me to report to him. He is over at the Goebbels’s.”

“Well I wish you’d report to me as well, when you get out.”

“I will, old boy, I will,” he promised, and rushed off.

What had happened, as I later discovered, was that Hanfstängl, who was trying to sleep off an attack of flu in a room of Göring’s presidential palace opposite to the Reichstag, had been awakened by the fire engines. He looked out of his window, saw the fire, rushed to the telephone and called Goebbels.

“The Reichstag is on fire,” he almost shrieked. “Tell the Führer.”

“Oh, stop that nonsense, Putzi. It is not even funny,” answered Goebbels.

“But I am telling the truth.”

“I am not listening to any more of your stale jokes. Go back to bed. Good night!” And Goebbels hung up.

The trouble was that just about four days earlier that merry little prankster Goebbels, to amuse Hitler, had played a telephone hoax on Hanfstängl. And when Hanfstängl called him with the Reichstag fire alarm he thought he was being hoaxed back.

But Hanfstängl rang again. “Look here! What I am telling you is the absolute truth. It is your duty to tell the Führer. If you don’t I guarantee there’ll be trouble!” Even no Goebbels would not believe him. However, this time he did pass the message to Hitler, who was in the next room talking to the fair Magda and a blond film starlet whom Magda had invited for the delectation of the Führer. (Hitler, so I was frequently assured by his paladins, found looking at beautiful blondes soothing for his nerves.) Now Hitler send Hanke to find out whether Hanfstängl was speaking the truth.

I was still waiting for Hanke to come out and give me an eyewitness description of what was gong on inside, when two black Mercedes cars drove through the police cordon. I knew those cars.

“That’s Hitler, I’ll bet!” I said to a man beside me. I ducked under the rope the police had just put up to keep spectators back and rushed across to check up. I got to the Reichstag entrance Portal Two, it was just as Hitler jumped out and dashed up the steps two at a time, the tails of his trench coat flying, his floppy black artist’s hat pulled down over his head. Goebbels and the bodyguard were behind him.

“Mind, I come along too?” I said to Sepp Dietrich. “Try you luck!” grinned Sepp. “Pop along in.”

Inside the entrance stood Göring, massive in a camel hair coat, his legs astride like some Frederician guardsman in a UFA film. His soft brown hat was turned up in front in what was called ‘Potsdam’ fashion. He was very red in the face and glared disapprovingly at me. How he would have loved to have thrown me out. But Hitler had just said “Evening , Herr Delmer,” and that was my ticket of admission.

Göring made his report to Hitler, while Goebbels and I stood at their side listening avidly.

“Without a doubt this is the work of the Communists, Herr Chancellor,” Göring said. “A number of Communist deputies were present here in the Reichstag twenty minutes before the fire broke out. We have succeeded in arresting one of the incendiaries.”

“Who is he?” Goebbels asked excitedly.

Göring turned to face him. “We don’t know yet,” he said with that thin shark’s mouth of his, “but we shall squeeze it out of him, have no fear, Doctor.” He said it as though he resented an implied criticism of his efficiency.

Then Hitler asked a question. “Are the other public buildings safe?”

“I have taken every possible precaution,” said Göring. “I’ve mobilised all the police. Every public building has been given a special guard. We are ready for anything.”

I am sure that he meant this seriously and was not just putting on an act. Both Hitler and Göring then still feared the possibility of a Communist coup. With six million votes at the last elections and a large number of adherents in the trade unions the Communists were still a formidable power. And they had in the past tried to capture power by coups – just as the Nazis had.

Then, Göring’s report done, we set off on a tour of the building. Across pools of water, charred debris, and through clouds of evil smelling smoke we made our way across rooms and corridors. Someone opened a yellow varnished oak door, and for a moment we peeped into the blazing furnace of the debating chamber. It was like opening the door of an oven. Although the fire brigade were spraying away lustily with their hoses, the fire was roaring up into the cupola with a fury which made us shut that door again in a hurry.

Göring picked a piece of rag off the floor near one of the charred curtains. “Here, you can see for yourself Herr Chancellor how they started the fire,” he said. “They hung cloths soaked in petrol over the furniture and set it alight.”

Notice the ‘they’. ‘They’ did this, ‘they’ did that. For Göring there was no question that more than one incendiary must have been at work. It had to be more than one to fit in with his conviction that the fire was the result of a Communist conspiracy. There had to be a gang of incendiaries. But as I looked at the rags and the other evidence, I could see nothing that one man could not have done on his own.

We came into a lobby filled with smoke. A policeman stepped out and barred the way with outstretched arms. “You must not pass here, Herr Chancellor. That candelabra may crash to the floor any moment.” And he pointed up at a crystal chandelier.

In the next corridor Hitler fell back a bit and joined me. He was moved to prophesy: “God grant,” he said “that this be the work of the Communists. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is the beginning.”

Just then he tripped over a hosepipe.

“You see this building,” he said, recovering his balance. “You see how it is aflame” – and he swept his hand around. “If the Communists got hold of Europe and had control of it for but six months – what am I saying! – two months – the whole continent would be aflame like this building.”

We climbed up some stairs to the first floor, and a moment later Herr von Papen appeared. He had come over from the Herrenklub where he had been entertaining the old President Hindenburg to dinner. Hitler was still in his trench coat, with his black soft hat on his head. Papen approached, very much the aristocrat, a beautifully cut grey tweed overcoat over his dress suit, a black-and-white scarf found his neck, his black Homburg hat in his gloved hand.

Hitler strode forward excitedly, seized Papen by the hand, and pumphandling him all the time, said in his Austrian German: “This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murder pest with an iron fist!”

Herr von Papen gently withdrew his hand. At that moment he really was the consummate diplomat.

“Er… Oh, yes,” he said, coldly repelling Hitler’s ungentlemanly fervour. “I understand that the Gobelins have escaped, and that the library most fortunately had not been touched either.”

Herr von Papen had switched the whole subject from politics into the purely material realm of fire damage, insurance, pounds, shillings and pence.

Hitler was so excited he did not notice it. Or, if he did, he pretended not to. He invited the Vice-Chancellor cordially to come into Göring’s office for a conference with him and Göring. “We are just about to decide on what measures should be taken next, Herr Vizekanzler. Won’t you join us?”

But Papen must have known that this fire was just about the end of any restraining power he might have over Hitler, and he was not walking into the lion’s den that night.

“Thank you very much, Herr Chancellor,” he said “very good of you indeed, but I think I must go and report to the Fieldmarshal first.”

It was a parting shot.

What he meant to say was: ‘There is yet another authority to be consulted with reference to any measures that you and Göring may decide.’

As I was leaving – shortly after Papen had gone – I met all kinds of Nazis trying to get in. Prince August Wilhelm, dressed in a long Stormtroopers greatcoat, was having an argument with the police guards, who would not let him through the cordon. As I crossed the road into the Park to run back to the office to telephone my story I saw him mounting the steps of the Reichstag.

And yet it was very soon being said that Prince August Wilhelm was one of the Nazis who lit the fire!

I expected congratulations from London for this world scoop. But I did not get any.

“Is the story okay?” I asked the sub-editor over the telephone, fishing for a compliment.

“Yes,” said the sub, “your story is okay, I suppose. But we don’t want all this political stuff. We want more about the fire. United Press reports that there are now 15 brigades on the spot and that the dome has fallen in.”

And the sub-editors cut the report and left out von Papen’s brilliantly deflating answers to Hitler.

Up in Manchester however, Beaverbrook was trying out a new editor, Arthur Christiansen. Where Baxter’s men in London had given my dispatch a spread over two columns Christiansen splashed it over four. Not very long after this Christiansen took over from Baxter in London.

The treatment of my scoop was, of course, only one among many reasons for this change.

In their conference Hitler and Göring decided that the ‘God given signal’ must be obeyed with the minimum delay. That very night, the political police under orders from Göring went into action against the Reds. Out came the list of Communist functionaries, of Communist Reichstag and Diet deputies and of Communist Trade Union leaders and Communist Municipal councillors. It had been prepared for just such an emergency years before by Weismann for his socialist boss Karl Severing. Within an hour and a half hundreds of plain clothes men, each accompanied by two constables armed with automatics, were rounding up the Communist key men and taking them off to prison. A few managed to escape. Among them a young fellow called Walter Ulbricht, who later, after the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, was to become the feared and hated satrap of Soviet East Germany.

On the morning of February 28th, while the newspapers splashed banner headlines about the “Communist plot”, Hitler and Papen went to see Hindenburg. Papen, after anxious debate with his Conservative friends, had as usual surrendered to Hitler. Now the two of them, dapper aristocrat Franz and wily Bohemian Adolf, presented the old President with a decree they wanted him to sign.

Hindenburg skimmed through the pages. Then he signed. What he signed was the death sentence on what there was of German democracy. For this decree suspended the civil liberties of the Weimar constitution and inaugurated the Police State. As Hitler had prophesied to me the night before, a new era for Germany had begun.

Hardly had Papen and Hitler said goodbye to each other on the steps of Hindenburg’s presidential palace, when lorries loaded with Hitler Stormtroops, hastily sworn in as “auxiliary police””, began to carry out the decree. All day long I watched them at their work, swooping on the pubs and the flats where the Communist rank and file had their hideouts, and carrying away whomever they found there. Sometimes to gaols, but most often they took their captives to Stormtroop cellars of the kind in which Goebbels had watched his boys teaching atheists to pray.

Other Stormtroop police were out with squads of bill posters tearing down all Communist election posters and pasting up Nazi ones in their place. Still others were going the rounds of the newspaper sellers, confiscating the Communist newspapers. Göring had prohibited them for the next four weeks – in fact until the election.

But the Communists were not the only Germans who were being rounded up and arrested. Thousands of non-Communists too were being taken in – lawyers, doctors, actors, journalists – all of them men and women known for their pacifist or anti-Nazi views. the newly opened concentration camps began to fill up.

Hitler, however, did not proscribe the Communist Party as such – not yet. He was too shrewd for that. he postponed the outright banning of the Communist Party until after the election had been held, in the hope that the Communists would continue to split the left-wing vote, and that when he did ban the party and its elected deputies after the election, this would give him the needed two-thirds majority for the Act enabling him to dispense with the Reichstag. His plan worked perfectly. That was exactly how things went.

But while the story of the Communist plot to set the Reichstag on fire proved an enormous success in Germany and gave Hitler all the political leverage he hoped for, it was beginning prove a liability abroad. No-one outside Germany would believe that the fire was not a pup up job. The shirtless man who had been captured in the Reichstag while he was trying to spread the flames still further – a young Dutch hitch-hiker named Marinus van der Lubbe – was assumed by the world at large to be a tool of the Nazis.

The insistence of Göring and Hitler that not just van der Lubbe alone, but a whole group of people must have been at work – a theory which they had to maintain and support in order to justify their story of a Communist plot – had just the opposite effect abroad. For people accepted it as a fact that more than one pair of hands was needed to produce such a big fire, and they decided the missing hands must be Nazi hands.

On March 2nd, three days before the election was due, I called on Hitler to hear what he had to say about this not altogether unpredictable boomerang. Hitler was furious. So angry that he said things which, to my mind, were not only silly but damaging to himself.

“I could have that Communist who was caught in the Reichstag hanged from the nearest tree,” he ranted. “That would dispose for ever of this vile slander that he was an agent of ours.”

A fantastic piece of unrealism. For had the Nazis killed van der Lubbe before he was tried this would have been just the thing to confirm the outside world’s suspicion that he was a tool of the Nazis whom they now wanted out of the way.

Hitler went on to declaim how Europe instead of accusing him of faking and framing should really be grateful to him for his courageous action against the common Bolshevik enemy.

“If Germany went Communist, as there was every danger that she might until I became Chancellor, then it would not be long before the rest of civilised Europe fell a prey to this Asiatic pest.” The Reichstag fire, he said, was just one of a series of terrorist coups which he declared the police could ‘prove’ had been planned by the Communists. he mentioned the abortive fire in the old Imperial Palace as another of them. (Investigation later proved that this fire too had been the work of van der Lubbe.)

“We have seized material by the hundredweight in the secret cellar of the Communist party Headquarters at the Bülowplatz,” said Hitler. “It proves irrefutably that these fires were intended to be the beacon signals for a nationwide campaign of dynamiting, incendiarism and mass murder. Why, these Bolshevist criminals had even made preparations to poison the water in the reservoirs!”

And then he made the inevitable ‘if-you-were-in-my-shoes’ comparison with Britain. “Suppose,” said Hitler, “that the Communists had tried to set Buckingham Palace on fire and had actually succeeded in burning down the House of Commons. Your government would have acted just as I have acted.”

I told him that the wave of arrests in Germany had caused rumours to spread both in Berlin and abroad that he was planning a great slaughter of his enemies. A kind of German St. Bartholomew’s night. Again Hitler gave me an answer which could hardly help his cause.

“I need no St. Bartholomew’s night,” he sneered. “Under the decrees for the Defence of the People and the State” (the one signed by President Hindenburg on February 28th) “we have set up tribunals which will try enemies of the state and deal with them in a way which will put an end to conspiracies.” In other words he was going to have a legal slaughter of his enemies. I asked him whether the suspension of civil liberties in Germany was to be permanent. This time his answer was more diplomatic and considerably less candid.

“No,” he said. “when the Communist menace is stamped out the normal order of things shall return. Our laws were too liberal for me to be able to deal effectively and swiftly with this Bolshevik underworld. But I myself am only too anxious for the normal state of affairs to be restored as quickly as possible. First, however, we must crush Communism out of existence.”

That was a very elastic promise. In fact, the civil liberties suppressed in that Reichstag Fire decree were never restored in Hitler’s lifetime. Nor do I believe he ever meant to restore them. For he needed the police terror in order to discipline the German people into readiness for the great war of revenge.

What was the truth about the Reichstag fire? Who really was responsible for it? The Nazis accused the Communists and the Communists the Nazis. In the world at large the Communist allegation has been accepted without question. Even by expert historians.

But I have always believed that neither the Nazis nor the Communists laid and lit this fire, but that both exploited it for their political warfare. the Nazis did so for the immediate objective of suppressing all opposition to themselves in Germany, the Communists for the long term objective of rallying the world against the Nazis. My own view I put forward in an article on Hitler and the Reichstag fir in 1939, when I said, “I rather suspect there was really just one incendiary who lit that fire – the lunatic van der Lubbe.”

Today I no longer suspect, I am sure of it.

On that night of February 27th, 1933 the shirtless youth who had been arrested in the burning Reichstag was immediately wrapped in rugs and taken off to the headquarters of the political police on the Alexanderplatz. There he was led straight to the office of the duty commissar, the then thirty-one year old Helmut Heisig. Marinus van der Lubbe underwent his first interrogation in Heisig’s room. In this first and all subsequent interrogations, van der Lubbe declared that he and he alone had set the Reichstag on fire. He had done so entirely on his own initiative and without any outside help or inspiration. His object in doing so, he said, was to incite the workers of Germany to ‘do something about Hitler’ before it was too late. Van der Lubbe however, was no Moscow Communist. He belonged to a Dutch Marxist splinter group called the ‘International Communists’ or the ‘Raden Communists’, which was fiercely opposed to Moscow.

Again and again Heisig and his superior Dr. Zirpins questioned van der Lubbe. They checked all his statements as to where he had been and how he had spent the days before the fire, how he had come to be in Germany, how he had bought the fire lighters which he used in the Reichstag, and at what shops. Van der Lubbe answered all their questions frankly and truthfully. He drew them a map, showing the route he followed as he climbed into the Reichstag, breaking a window as he did so – he had been observed in the act – and then rushed from room to room laying a trail of fire until he ran out of firelighters and used his own shirt and coat. It all tallied. Even when Heisig and Zirpins checked him over the route with a stopwatch to see whether he could have done in the time available all that he claimed to have done. Heisig and Zirpins came to the firm conclusion that van der Lubbe was telling the truth and that he, and he alone, had lit the fire. And Heisig, who is alive as I write, still sticks to this opinion.

But this view of the detectives did not suit Göring’s book or Hitler’s The fire had to be the work of a gang, a Communist gang. If it was not, the whole moral foundation of their new Police State was undermined. When Heisig, who had been sent to Leiden in Holland to investigate van der Lubbe’s Dutch background, gave an interview to Dutch newspapers saying that van der Lubbe was the sole culprit, Göring flew into a passionate rage and had Heisig immediately recalled.

The public prosecutor working on the case, one Dr. Vogt, aware that his career depended on his taking the same view of the facts as Hitler and Göring, refused to accept his inefficient CID officials’ report. He called in fire experts like Wagner, one of Berlin’s fire chiefs, who declared, “…the fire in the debating chamber could never have assumed the extent it did in such a short time… had not the chamber been specially prepared for the fire.” A chemical expert named Dr. Schatz declared in an affidavit that in his opinion “probably a petrol derivate… either paraffin or motor spirit… had been used. The petrol soaked material (rags, cotton-waste or the like) must have been stowed among the chairs and desks and had petrol poured over it.” But despite all these imaginative and splendidly subservient theories, the chemical experts who examined the debris had to admit: “Concerning the manner in which the debating chamber was prepared for the fire and what incendiary devices were used, the meticulously careful examination undertaken during the clearing up of the debris has given no indications. It has also not been possible to ascertain any trace that suggests inflammable liquids such as petroleum, benzine, benzol or ether had been used.”

But even this negative evidence from the chemical examination of the debris did not put the Public Prosecutor off persisting with his Communist gang theory. Under the German system – which, alas, is the same today as it was then – public prosecutors and judges are employees of the State. Nominally independent, they are subject in their careers to ministerial displeasure and therefore easily influenced by higher authority. Dr. Vogt pressed on with the charge. For he now had not only van der Lubbe to accuse, but the Communist deputy Torgler, who had been the last to leave the house before the fire, and three Bulgarian agents of the Comintern, Popoff, Taneff and Dimitroff. All four had been arrested and charged with arson.

To Dr. Vogt it did not matter at all that Taneff, Popoff and Dimitroff were miles away from Berlin on the night of the fire and that Torgler too could prove his innocence. Nor did he mind that they were bound to be acquitted – as indeed they were at the subsequent trial before the Supreme Court in Leipzig. All he cared about was his career. And his career depended on his keeping the Communist plot story going to please his masters.

The Nazis had suborned their scientific experts, twisted and faked the evidence, all in order to show that van der Lubbe could not possibly have raised the fire entirely by himself – as he claimed and as the CID men who had checked his story had confirmed. The Nazis insisted that a whole gang of incendiaries must have been at work. Now the Communists joyfully took up the Nazi thesis to use it as the foundation for the accusation that the Nazis were the authors of the fire and van der Lubbe their tool.

Author in chief – of the ‘Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it’ fiction – was Willy Münzenberg, the propaganda genius of the German Communist Party. He had managed to escape the German police roundup on February 28th and to flee to Paris. Willy, a dynamic little fellow full of charm and imagination, whom I was later to meet frequently in Paris, soon set up a workshop in the student quarter on the left bank. Then, with the help of a small team of collaborators he proceeded to fake up a number of stories all going to show that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi conspiracy. Every little bit of fact that came the way of the team was seized, twisted and embellished to make up the ‘dossier’ which was promptly published in two ‘Brown Books’.

The recipe by which they worked was simple enough. For instance when Walter Gempp, the Berlin Fire chief who had personally directed the operations in the burning Reichstag, was dismissed because he had accepted extensive bribes from a fire extinguisher concern, Willy Münzenberg and his merry men immediately turned him into a brave anti-Nazi martyr. Gempp, they said, had been got rid of because he knew too much about the fire’s Nazi origin, and because he had complained publicly that he had been hindered by the Nazis in his fire fighting. He had complained, they alleged, that when his firemen got into the Reichstag they found at least twenty Stormtroopers already there. A brilliant invention. I can vouch myself, that when I went round the burning building, we met only police officers, no Stormtroopers. But it was universally accepted as the truth.

On May 8th, 1933, Ernst Oberfohren, the deputy chief of the nationalist Party and a bitter opponent of his leader Hugenberg’s alliance with Hitler, committed suicide out of chagrin over the way things were going in Germany. Münzenberg at once faked up a secret document which, he alleged, Oberfohren had left behind telling the inside history of the fire. It too proved wonderfully effective. My colleague of the Manchester Guardian fell for the fake and sent a long dispatch, citing it as proof of the Nazis’ guilt.

My editor immediately wanted to know why I had not done the same. So I pointed out that apart from other improbabilities contained in the alleged Oberfohren document, I was particularly doubtful concerning the validity of one of the ten points it put forward as proof of the Nazi guilt. This ‘point’ was not in the Manchester Guardian version. But it was contained in the copy of the document I had seen.

“I think you will agree that it rather undermines the credibility of Herr Oberfohren’s alleged revelations – if indeed he was their author. Listen to this!” And then I read him the passage.

“Hitler’s constant companion and friend, the English journalist Delmer,” it said, “telegraphed full details of the fire to his newspaper before it was discovered, and the name of van der Lubbe as being the culprit.”

The Editor agreed that perhaps we had not been scooped after all.

Münzenberg and his team freely seasoned their inventions with Nazi names to give them the stamp of authenticity. Heines, the Stormtroop leader, they said had led a posse of his men into the Reichstag, through the subterranean passage connecting it with Göring’s palace. There they had then poured petrol over the benches in the assembly hall. The story was believed all the world over. The fact that Heines was four hundred miles away at Gleiwitz in Silesia, when this was supposed to be happening, did not detract from it at all.

The Münzenberg team declared that the protocol drawn up by Commissary Heisig and Commissary Zirpins during their interrogation of van der Lubbe and signed by him had been destroyed because in it van der Lubbe said that he had not laid the fire in the debating chamber. ‘Someone else’ he was alleged to have said, ‘must have done that.’ He had only set fires in the restaurant and the corridors. In fact the protocol was never destroyed. It still exists today and extracts from it were recently published. In it – as I have already stated – van der Lubbe states that he was responsible for all the fires in the building and had no helpers. And he continued to protest his sole responsibility for the fire at the trial – right up to the last.

When the Nazis tried to contradict the ‘Brown Book’s’ accusations they were too late. The world, shocked by their appalling crimes against the Jews and horrified by the lawlessness of the Stormtroops, was only too ready to believe that the fire was their work.

The legend first sponsored by Münzenberg grew and grew. After the collapse of Hitler, it became standard practice for former Nazi highups to alibi themselves with some new piece of ‘evidence’ proving that the Nazis fired the Reichstag. But in almost all instances they merely elaborated some point in Willy Münzenberg’s ingenious myth.

Even today, when the ‘Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it’ legend has been thoroughly exploded as a result of the meticulous and painstaking historical investigation done by the German writer Fritz Tobias,* I fear it will still live on among the historical lumber filling the minds of most people.

Walendy: On the occasion of the Reichstag fire in 1933, Münzenburg issued a mendacious “Brown Book” portraying the “guilt of the National Socialists,” organized the “Reichstag counter-trial against Hermann Göring,” gave birth to a whole series of such “brown books” and a flood of similar pamphlets and emigré newspapers. The uninhibited mendacity of his activities was exposed by Fritz Tobias in Der Reichstagsbrand – Legende und Wirklichkeit (‘The Reichstag Fire – Legend and Reality’), Rastatt/Baden 1962.